This Recording - Politics

There Will Be No More Links For You And Your Friends

by Alex Carnevale

Who are you? Why are you visiting these links? Answer me.

There's been a terrifying lull before the storm, or should we say lul. Answer me.

Molly is sick so she can't post, and yet she still bills me for the hours. According to Molly I owe her $80,000 grand and I have to pay her parking tickets.

It isn't the Bryan Singer-Tom Cruise plot to kill Adolf movie Valkyrie that has us disgusted beyond all plausible recognition. After all, how is else is Peter Biskind going to get his next book deal?

There is but one upcoming film that may signal an international problem- this time in the arena of in U.S.-Thailand relations.

they pitched it as Shopgirl meets Hard Target

P.S. Thailand, we liked you better when you were called Myanmar. Whoa, settle down, Thailand, it's like you'd never been confused with Burma before. Whoa, settle down Myanmar, that was directed at Thailand.

Bangkok Dangerous will probably have to use full-frontal Cagity to get anyone to watch it, but that worked for Lust, Caution. South Park broke the penis taboo on TV the other day, I actually didn't know what a penis looked like until I saw Mr. Garrison's on a mouse.

One thing is for sure: Bangkok will contain far more jokes than Step Brothers.

in the third act, they get into NASCAR

I don't understand when John C. Reilly became a viable comic actor. Did he accidentally bone Maya Rudolph and get himself uncast from There Will Be Blood? Is he paying alimony to seventeen betches?

Someone needs to end this pairing. The only thing worse is the prospect of Zooey and Chloe in an indie western comedy, three words that you want at least 30 feet apart at all times. This is just validating my fear that ultimately Judd and his minions are doing more harm than good.

Not to be outdone, the veteran comedy moneymakers are striking back...with a Rambo parody. Wow. Charlie Sheen is going to be receiving residuals for this movie and he's not even in it.

the fiery end of three careers

The amazing part of this "film" is that somehow Tom Cruise has a part in it as well. (His reps tried to strike down pics of him in his fat suit.) Tom wants people to laugh with him above all, he watches his key scene from Risky Business every night after masturbating with his E-meter. I hope he doesn't actually star with Stiller in the Hardy Boys' movie Hardy Men.

Although Night at the Museum is perhaps the finest film of its generation, the world did not need to see Stiller and Wilson in Tropic Thunder, so it appears that Kate Hudson's ballbusting ways have finally rewarded us.

did they even need the fat suit?

If Cruise agrees to appear in Todd Philips' disastrous tour-de-force Men, about an advertising executive (why doesn't Tom just work in advertising and give up acting?) who takes an apartment with his wife's lover to save his marriage, I will turn green. That this storyline will be perilously real by the time this movie comes out is a virtual lock.

Tom's only path to regaining relevance is to appear as a pedophile on Gossip Girl. Better yet, he should get Kristen Bell fired from voiceover duties and narrate that bad boy.

From the guys who ruined the memory of Freaks and Geeks

Seth Rogen has tested me for the last time. I am going to digitally alter the entire run of Undeclared so I can insert Eddie Izzard as a cyborg sent to go back in time and prevent Pineapple Express from ever getting made. The memory of James Franco being attractive and Seth Rogen being cute is a bromance that needs to end. I need to curl up with that Stacey Dash photoset and cry for awhile, enjoy the links.

LA Times makes up stuff about Guantanamo Bay

The signs of Times Square

So Greg Hill, Lucas Farrell, and Brandon Shimoda had this idea to put together a journal in about six hours. The astonishing results are here.

Obama at the helm

John J. Miller's piece about "liberal" wikipedia is funny:

It’s impossible to say whether these biases influence voters, but lots of web activists have made up their own minds. The 2006 reelection campaign of Republican senator George Allen of Virginia is a case in point. “The left-wing netroots used to advertise on blogs and elsewhere for people to post negative information about us,” says Jon Henke, who was a new-media coordinator for Allen. “On Wikipedia, we got our brains beat out.” Whereas the entry on Allen came to read like a compendium of opposition research, the one on Allen’s Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, didn’t suffer the same kind of treatment. “His profile was glowing,” says Henke. In the end, Webb narrowly defeated Allen.

The problem has nothing to do with the rules governing Wikipedia. “The policy guidelines are very good and having a neutral point of view is close to a sacred rule,” says one experienced editor, a conservative who has worked on political content. “Conservatives shouldn’t whine about bias because they can correct it themselves.”

In order to do so, however, they need manpower. “We’re up against a bunch of liberals without jobs who are making these changes,” says Patrick Ruffini, a GOP political consultant. So far, however, conservatives have found it difficult to respond. Last summer, David All, a Republican web strategist, tried to organize conservative Wikepedians to serve as watchdogs. “Each of the top 200 races in 2008 should have at least one volunteer responsible for monitoring Wikipedia,” says All. “There are people out there who won’t make phone calls or lick stamps for candidates, but who will be active online. For a campaign, this could be just as important as a traditional ground game.” The effort sputtered out and All has moved on to other projects, but he still believes it’s something that Republicans should try to tackle in more than an ad hoc fashion.

"Up Against the Wall" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)

"Start to Melt" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)

"Poor Cow" - Peter Bjorn and John (mp3)

Lightspeed Champion live.

New albums for you to enjoy.

Is this America's best prosecutor?

Jason Reitman turns down Justice League

This picture of M. Ward and Zooey freaks me.

neoconservatism in 1776

new Wolf Parade

I loved Colm Toibin's piece on Hart Crane in the NYRB:

In April 1917 Crane wrote to his father of his great ambition:

I shall really without doubt be one of the foremost poets in America if I am enabled to devote enough time to my art.

The poetry he intended to write was to be highly wrought and full of self-conscious and hard-won artistry. Although there are times in his work when a word or a phrase seems chosen at random, selected for its sound as much as it sense, his letters emphasize that he was not interested in a dream language or summoning his phrases at random from the well of the unconscious. In January 1921 he wrote to a friend about the Dadaist movement: "I cannot figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane jumble of the four winds, the six senses, and plum pudding." And two weeks later he wrote to another friend: "There is little to be gained in any art, so far as I can see, except with much conscious effort." Later that year, he wrote again:

I admit to a slight leaning toward the esoteric, and am perhaps not to be taken seriously. I am fond of things of great fragility, and also and especially of the kind of poetry John Donne represents, a dark musky, brooding, speculative vintage, at once sensual and spiritual, and singing rather the beauty of experience rather than innocence.

The following year he wrote to Allen Tate: "Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!"

After 24 years in the Soviet Union...

I'm not that into naps, are you?

I like this tumblr

Casting the Bush movie. I am in talks to play Dick Cheney, didn't you know?

21: terrible movie, dope soundtrack